HDYK Episode 4: It's not me, it's the machine with Jason Williams Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

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HDYK Episode 4: It's not me, it's the machine with Jason Williams

August 12, 2021 • Christie Bahlai

Hey! How are you? We’re ok. Keepin’ on, keepin’ on. Are you ready for a new HDYK episode?

Some of the most dynamic and influential scientists I know are the connectors. These are the people who can see things from multiple perspectives and bring people together, letting their passion energize new ways of doing things.

And our guest today is one of those rare people. Jason Williams is Assistant Director of Inclusion and Research Readiness at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center, and an all-around amazing human.

This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout out to Kristen Dowling and Emily Loccisano for managing our digital presence and branding. Music featured in this episode is Sunbeams, by Monkey Warhol, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!

Transcript is available here.